Contract oversight can be like buying a car. You walk the lot and find a real beauty of a car—shiny, blue, just like you always wanted, and at a price you can afford. You start to fall in love with it, and know you should ask to look under the hood. But do you really want to take a look?

If you do look under the hood, chances are you will see some flaws. They might be little problems, or they could be catastrophic. The question is, how hard do you want to look?

Federal managers, especially those involved in procurements, say that they want to have a lasting impact and leave their organizations better off than before they came. Most start out with grand plans, an open mind, and a real desire to make positive changes.

But then something happens… The change is much harder than they realized, or they come to understand that their organization is more interested in avoiding trouble than making things better. They may start to implement a new system, but when it doesn’t really achieve the goal, and it becomes more trouble than it was worth, they give it a rest. Or the whole process is just too burdensome to begin in the first place. So risk aversion becomes the goal, not transformation. Managers become discouraged, hold the line, and fire up the retirement clock to count the days.

A Government Accountability Office study released Nov. 14 examined seven successfully acquired government IT investments and found certain concepts used in at least three of the acquisitions.

The common factors found in successful projects included program officials being actively engaged with stakeholders, which garnered use by all seven projects. Surprisingly, only three of the projects reported receiving sufficient funding.

Now that we are into the third week of this shutdown, I wanted to give a perspective on the shutdown from a small federal contracting firm. My partner Ron and I have spent just over 6 years creating our company, building and serving our clients, finding and training amazing employees, and building a culture that I would stack up against any company in our industry. It’s been an adventure, a huge learning experience, and something I would never trade for anything. That makes the shutdown and the potential for a debt default all the more wrenching.

Some analysts believe the federal shutdown’s effects on contractors will linger even after the government reopens and resolves the dispute over the debt ceiling, Bloomberg reported Thursday. Kathleen Miller and Danielle Ivory write several federal contractors have experienced late payments, stop-work orders and solicitation cancellations amid the shutdown.

The government market offers plenty of opportunities for startups and entrepreneurs to develop a solid income flow to help weather those first few difficult years when businesses are exposed to unreliable and unsteady revenue streams. Developing an effective business positioning strategy is essential in winning that first government contract.

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